Container redundancy
Test resilience to container failures by shutting down a randomly selected container. Verify that your container runtime automatically restarts or replaces it.
Experiment types
Shutdown
Targets
Containers
Length
5 minutes
How this Scenario works
This Scenario shuts down a randomly selected container, simulating an unexpected container failure. This tests whether your container runtime's restart policies and health check mechanisms detect the failure and recover automatically.
Why run this Scenario?
This Scenario uses the same principle as Chaos Monkey: if a host or container shuts down unexpectedly, the underlying platform should detect this and automatically restart or replace it.
- Validate that container restart policies are configured correctly and recover failed containers within acceptable timeframes.
- Verify that load balancers or service meshes route traffic away from the failed container during recovery.
- Test that container health checks detect the failure and trigger restarts appropriately.
- Confirm that container-level failures don't cascade into broader application outages.
What to expect when you run it
When a container fails, the container runtime or orchestrator automatically restarts or replaces it, and traffic is routed to healthy replicas.
More Scenarios to try
Kubernetes packet loss
Ensure your Kubernetes systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate liveness/readiness probe and load balancer behavior.
Container packet loss
Ensure your containerized systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate health check and load balancer behavior.
Windows packet loss
Ensure your Windows systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate health check and load balancer behavior.
Avoid downtime. Use Gremlin to turn failure into resilience.
Gremlin empowers you to proactively root out failure before it causes downtime. See how you can harness chaos to build resilient systems by requesting a demo of Gremlin.
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